Wednesday, 30 October 2019

“The Vietnam War was a tragedy, immeasurable and irredeemable. But meaning can be found in the individual stories of those who lived through it, stories of courage and comradeship and perseverance, of understanding and forgiveness and, ultimately, reconciliation.”—Peter Coyote, the narrator in The Vietnam Warby Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

“In terms of content, The Vietnam War, written by the historian Geoffrey C. Ward and narrated by Peter Coyote, is rich, revelatory, and scrupulously evenhanded. It succeeds in large part by not being reductive or succinct—by being, in fact, rather overstuffed, a lot to take in…. By dint of its thoroughness, its fairness, and its pedigree, The Vietnam War is as good an occasion as we’ve ever had for a levelheaded national conversation about America’s most divisive foreign war. It deserves to be, and likely will be, the rare kind of television that becomes an event.”

— David Kamp, “Why The Vietnam War Is Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s Most Ambitious Project Yet”Vanity FairSeptember, 2017.

John Musgrave

"There is a family of these witnesses; we never hear the voice of an interviewer. One of the most beguiling is John Musgrave, a Marine so badly wounded in Vietnam that several doctors rated him ‘expected’. He became a drop-out and an alcoholic, a would-be suicide and a protester who is still battling the melodrama of the war and the effects of his wounds. He is now a poet and a spokesman for veterans. We feel his romantic recklessness, as he tries to reconcile what happened to him with what he wished had happened. Another witness, Tim O’Brien (author of Going after Cacciato and The Things They Carried), has been a success in life, but is so anguished still that he has difficulty looking at the camera. Musgrave, on the other hand, stares into the lens as if it were his mirror. He deserves a novel or a movie, and because so many of the witnesses are just as conflicted as he is The Vietnam War acquires the density of a sprawling work of fiction....This is the point: The Vietnam War isn’t just about the war but the consequences it had for Americans. There is a great deal from the home front here, and while the jukebox of great rock and roll on the soundtrack makes the ordeal seem exciting sometimes, it leaves little doubt that the cultural revolutions of the 1960s – Merrill McPeak’s ‘rivulets’ – were a liberation for a minority and one that left a schism in America still emphatically evident in the 2016 election."— David Thomson, "Merely an Empire," London Review of Books, September 21, 2017 Another insightful review can be found in The New York Review of Books

Perhaps the best drama on Vietnam and the incident that it is based upon that is referenced in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War is the 1989 film, Casualties of War.

"Casualties of War
is a film based, we are told, on an actual event. A five-man patrol of American
soldiers in Vietnam kidnapped a young woman from her village, forced her to
march with them, and then raped her and killed her. One of the five refused to
participate in the rape and murder, and it was his testimony that eventually
brought the others to a military court martial and prison sentences. The movie
is not so much about the event as about the atmosphere leading up to it - the
dehumanizing reality of combat, the way it justifies brute force and penalizes
those who would try to live by a higher standard....

More than most films, it depends on the
strength of its performances for its effect - and especially on Penn's
performance. If he is not able to convince us of his power, his rage and his
contempt for the life of the girl, the movie would not work. He does, in a
performance of overwhelming, brutal power. Fox, as his target, plays a
character most of us could probably identify with, the person to whom rape or
murder is unthinkable, but who has never had to test his values in the crucible
of violence. The movie's message, I think, is that in combat human values are
lost and animal instincts are reinforced. We knew that already. But the movie
makes it inescapable, especially when we reflect that the story is true, and
the victim was real."

This memorial is now thought to be the most successful and beloved public work of our time. It is so simple, so elegant, that it makes its statement without even trying. The long arms of marble enclose us. We see the names of the dead. We are left with our thoughts.

The most arresting scenes in the documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision are about the miracle that this memorial was even erected at all—about its opponents, who would have replaced it with something ordinary and mundane.

Today, when the memorial is universally beloved, such men as Pat Buchanan and Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) are not quick to remind you that they fought against it, in ways that do not reflect well on their judgment or taste.... Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, written and directed byFreida Lee Mock, tells the story of how Lin designed the memorial, and how it came to be built. It follows her over the next 14 years, as she matures from an insecure student to a confident professional, and designs other public works, including the Civil Rights Monument in Montgomery, Ala. "

—Selections from a review by Roger Ebert

"Kathleen
Belew’s gripping study of white power, Bring the War Home, as written before
the city of Charlottesville became a hashtag, and is largely concerned with
activities from the 1970s and ’80s. But it is. Her activists — for indeed,
these were activists building a grass-roots movement — consolidated power in
the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It is that starting point that hints at the
book’s explosive thesis: that the white power movement that reached a
culmination with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombingemerged as a
radical reaction to the war.

Sit with that for a
moment, because it is a breathtaking argument, one

that treats foreign policy as the impetus for
a movement that most people view through the lens of domestic racism. But
Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago,
perceives something more in the white
power movement than metastasized racism. She sees the malignant consequence of
the war, which, she argues, “comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.”

— From a review by Nicole Hemmer

"Too many people still think of these attacks as
single events, rather than interconnected actions carried out by domestic
terrorists. We spend too much ink dividing them into anti-immigrant, racist,
anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic attacks. True, they are these things. But they are
also connected with one another through a broader white power ideology.

Likewise, too many people think that such shootings
are the goal of fringe activism. They aren’t. They are planned to incite a much
larger slaughter by 'awakening' other people to join the movement.

The El Paso manifesto, if it is verified, ties the
attacker into the mainstream of the white power movement, which came together
after the Vietnam War and united Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead and other activists."

—Kathleen Belew, “The Right Way to Understand White
Nationalist Terrorism," The New York TimesAugust 4, 2019.

Tuesday, 22 October 2019

When the Scottish-born author, Philip Kerr, died of
cancer last year at the age of 62, he left behind the manuscript of Metropolis which turned out to be the
14th novel in the Bernie Gunther series. Although he wrote several standalone
novels and a children's fantasy series, he will probably best be remembered for
thehard-boiled, iconoclastic Berlin detective
turned private investigator.

Philip Kerr

The Weimar Republic,
specifically 1928 Berlin, is the locale of Metropolis.The novel is
a prequel to the series that began thirty years ago with the publication of March Violets set in 1936 Nazi Germany at
the time of the Olympics. Interestingly, that time-span roughly matches the aging
of the novels' cynical protagonist since Kerr's penultimate novel, Greeks Bearing Gifts takes place in 1957.

Metropolis has all the earmarks ofthe Bernie Gunther novels: thorough historical research that illuminates
rather than overwhelms the plot and characters, a sharp eye for detail,
razor-sharp dialogue that will remind readers of Raymond Chandler's, Philip
Marlowe, and interior acerbic monologue that is often at odds with his reassuring words that are largely driven by self-interest, at times sheer survival.

Wednesday, 16 October 2019

“You will see the effect upon people. They will acclaim it with enthusiasm; everybody is already looking forward to the first onslaught—so dull have their lives become.

—Herman Hesse, Damian

"One of the most troubling reasons men love war is the love of destruction, the thrill of killing...all you do is move the finger so imperceptibly, just a wish flashing across your mind like a shadow, not even a full brain synapse, and poof, in a blast of sound and energy and light a truck or a house or even people disappear, everything flying and settling back into dust."

—William Broyles, "Why Men Love War," Esquire, November1984, veteran of the Vietnam War

"Oh! What a Lovely War does recreate this time, in a bitter
mixture of history, satire, detail, panorama and music.

Especially music. There is something paradoxical in the thought
of singing about a war, and yet cheap popular songs often capture the spirit of
a time better than any collection of speeches and histories. Miss (Joan) Littlewood (in the 1963 stage production),
and (Richard) Attenborough after her, present the war as a British music hall review;
there's a lot of smiling up front, but backstage you can see the greasepaint
and smell the sweat, and the smiles become desperate, and there begins to be
blood.

This sense is captured most tellingly in Maggie Smith's scene.
She plays a robust, patriotic broad who lures the young men from the audience
to the stage with promises of love and implications of heroic death. But death
is reserved for the young, not for the old, and John Mills (as Sir Douglas
Haig) stays far behind the lines, studying the front from an observation tower.
Meanwhile, politicians, kings and rulers play stupid games of diplomacy and
etiquette, and 'acceptable losses' are counted in the hundreds of
thousands. But always everyone whistles a happy tune...."

That Line of Darkness: Vol. 2

That Line of Darkness: Vol. 1

About Me

Author of That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War, Encompass Editions (2012) and second volume, That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions (2013).